Fintech Focus For April 23, 2021
Quote To Start The Day: You’ll never find a rainbow if you’re looking down.
Source: Charlie Chaplin
One Big Thing In Fintech: Ant Group, operator of popular Chinese mobile payment service Alipay, plans to slash its direct carbon emissions by nearly a third by 2025 as part of its journey towards carbon neutrality at the end of this decade.
Source: SCMP
Other Key Fintech Developments:
- Welcome Tech closes $35M round.
- Metromile adds new CFO to team.
- Affirm will buy Returnly for $300M.
- HSBC launches AI-powered index.
- R3 Development Fund is investing.
- Neo-broker BUX has raised $80M.
- NYDIG has acquired Arctos Capital.
- The controversy on bitcoin mining.
- Traders turn to tried, tested algos.
- PicPay payments tool files for IPO.
- Bridge adding real-time payments.
- Cadence rebrands, raises funding.
- Digital Asset raises a $120M round.
- Robinhood adds COO for cryptos.
- Public adds Town Hall chat feature.
- FlexTrade adds QuantHouse data.
- Reef Finance set launch for Chain.
- Micro Bitcoin futures are launching.
- Sift raises $50M, added leadership.
Watch Out For This: Nearly 600,000 first-year college students take calculus annually in the U.S., and 250,000 fail, according to Woodie Flowers, professor of mechanical engineering at MIT.
At $2,000 per failed course, that’s nearly $500 million in losses for students each year.
How can that failure rate be cut in half? The professor suggests investing nearly $100 million into classroom alternatives like online learning.
That’s the idea behind Outlier.org, an online education platform created and led by Aaron Rasmussen, the co-founder of MasterClass, a streaming platform where anyone can learn from the world’s authority on a variety of topics.
In light of Outlier’s $30-million Series B round led by venture capital firm GV, Benzinga spoke with CEO and founder Rasmussen on motivations, recent developments and future plans.
Source: Benzinga
Interesting Reads:
- Program to pay farmers not to farm.
- Planes are providing a trove of data.
- Goldman sees SPAC driving frenzy.
- Senators unveiled bill for migration.
- Dimon sees JPM workers maskless.
- Elon, XPRIZE discussed challenges.
Market Moving Headline: Stocks fell Thursday following media reports that President Biden wants to nearly double the capital gains tax paid by wealthy Americans.
Source: Axios
© 2022 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.
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